Revelation Road

Norah Jones and Fiona Apple find new sounds on their old paths.

A new film about the band LCD Soundsystem is called “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” which feels like a taunt reclaimed as an epigraph. Fiona Apple and Norah Jones, each a decade or more into their careers, know this problem and the question it implies: How, without calcifying, do you remain the performer who initially enticed your audience? Peril bookends the choices: at one end, the artist risks being so consistent that she is irreversibly tied to an era (like Alanis Morissette); at the other, she can make the daredevil choice of changing her persona, with the attendant risk of mangling the work (like Bob Dylan). Jones, on her new album, “Little Broken Hearts,” confronts the perception of herself as the sweet one; Apple, on hers, “The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do,” delves further into the crazy-girl narrative. In different ways, both artists use their thumbnail bios as material to push against, finding new roles inside their reputations.

Ten years ago, Jones changed pop with her quiet début album, “Come Away with Me.” It earned her five Grammys and has sold more than twenty million copies. It has aged well, despite its reputation as background music. With an easy sensuality, Jones found the seam between pop and jazz, writing songs that sound as if she grew up immersed in the canon and knows how to sing a gentle version of it. Jones and her collaborators Jesse Harris and Lee Alexander carried out a clever vision, beating acts like Nouvelle Vague to the punch by several years: they collected standards by Hank Williams and Hoagy Carmichael, wrote new songs that bridged the gaps between the classics, and then recorded the results in a lounge-music style, almost as if they were covering themselves. Her later albums provided consistent evidence that she is a vocalist of the first order, though her songwriting is not always as engaged. But this calm is part of her strength—Jones is evenly sane, wearing her fame so lightly that at a show I saw, in which she shared the bill, she came out and said hello to fans between numbers. (She says that her pragmatic approach likely comes from her mother’s disdain for the music business, the result of her relationship with Jones’s father, the musician Ravi Shankar.)

Jones has one of the most textured and tactile voices in pop—it has real heft, even when played at low volume on laptop speakers. Her vocals are a cottony mix of breath and surprisingly low pitches; the voice reassures even before her lyrics sink in. Her ambling style works so well that she rarely sings out in full voice on recordings. It’s a confusing demurral. At a bar in Brooklyn, two years ago, after a screening of a movie in which she played a small part, she sang backup on a few songs played by the band of one of the other actors. Jones tore a hole in the small venue, showing the full measure of her expansive voice, and the nice young man performing his own song faded from view. It is hard to sort out why Jones doesn’t use more of that power under her own name.

An invitation in 2010 to work on “Rome,” an album inspired by soundtracks of spaghetti Westerns, brought Jones together with the musician Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), who ended up producing “Little Broken Hearts.” Jones played the very relaxed chanteuse on three of “Rome” ’s tracks, which made use of clipped, echoing vocals and tremolo guitars. On “Hearts,” Burton and Jones played and wrote all the music together, swapping instruments, and then later filled in some of the songs with other musicians. It’s no more musically abrasive than any of her other albums—it’s just smarter, and Jones sounds angry. There was a breakup, and another woman. In fact, if your name is Miriam, Jones has some harsh words for you.

The record features vocal and guitar styles similar to those found on “Rome,” and the album leans more toward the ache of country than to the lullaby comfort of “Come Away with Me.” “Good Morning” sets up a theme and a sound—someone strums an acoustic guitar lazily, a keyboard chimes in the background, and cellos eventually round out the song. Jones sings, “Good morning, my thoughts on leaving are back on the table, I thought you should know.” Moments later, the conditional becomes final: “I’m folding my hand.” She’s a champion of breath control; on all her albums, she has placed her quiet vocals prominently in the mix. Burton understands, and as a producer he doesn’t deviate from this part of Jones’s aesthetic.

The album repeatedly pairs Jones with an inviting, restrained accompaniment, as she sings about letting go, sometimes with muted resignation, sometimes with a plan. “She’s 22” has a classic cowboy-ballad feel, in which a rhythm guitar clops along beneath her until a slide guitar enters. Whoever left Jones found someone younger—twenty-two, to be precise. “You sure look happy. Are you really happy?” Jones sings, then repeats, “Does she make you happy?” over and over, as if patiently questioning a small child about his plans to become a professional baseball player. By “Miriam,” toward the end of the album, Jones isn’t quite so resigned. She begins, “Miriam, you know you done me wrong. I’m gonna smile when you say goodbye,” and gets more insistent: “Miriam, when you were having fun in my big pretty house, did you think twice? Miriam, was it a game to you? Was it a game to him? Don’t tell me lies.” The music shimmers, like a simpler version of a Radiohead song: piano and guitar move through a slow arpeggio, alongside a hushed drum pattern. “Oh, Miriam, that’s such a pretty name, and I’ll keep saying it until you die.” It took a breakup to rattle Jones—and the selfish listener thanks the rake who caused it.

Fiona Apple has always been in the process of breaking up, usually preëmptively—before you can ask, she will provide a list of reasons not to love her. On a brief tour this spring, she opened each night with the rollicking “Fast As You Can,” from 1999, which is her signature guarantee of interpersonal mayhem: “Oh, darling, it’s so sweet, you think you know how crazy, how crazy I am. You say you don’t spook easy, you won’t go, but I know, and I pray that you will.” Much has been made of her comments at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards that the music world is “bullshit,” and of several instances of her leaving the stage mid-performance. These moments have become to Apple as bat-biting has been to Ozzy Osbourne—dramatic anecdotes that play well.

But those stories have been replaced with a calmer narrative; by her own account, she’s spent much of the past few years doing little more than walking her dog, visiting the club Largo, near her house in Los Angeles, and working on small projects like filming hummingbirds. The stories do say something about obsession and control, and are indicative of how exacting an artist she is. After four albums in sixteen years, Apple has racked up maybe five bad songs, total. “Idler Wheel” is less crammed with detail than her last record, “Extraordinary Machine,” but it has the same effect: once heard, a song lodges in the mind, melodies take root, and words loop of their own accord. It is an astonishing album.

She and the producer, Charley Drayton (who is also the drummer), keep “Idler Wheel” relatively unadorned. There is little reason to embellish, as Apple’s work is so rich to begin with, especially her piano playing and singing. She has never sounded like a beginner, even when she was one. Apple and Drayton fill out the songs with atonal sounds that don’t fight the chords or the top lines: a one-two march of her walking on sand rhythmically, throughout “Periphery”; shrieking children, in the last minute of “Werewolf”; a rhythmic and metallic clatter that runs low beneath “Jonathan.” It took sixteen years, but the answer now seems obvious—the way to accompany Apple is to stay out of her way.

The crazy verities are still here. On “Left Alone,” Apple gives us another mission statement: “How can I ask anyone to love me when all I do is beg to be left alone?” She sings this as if she’s gritting her teeth at first, then repeats it in full voice, then sings as if she’s crawling around the studio on all fours. There’s probably not another singer on a major label who gets to commit her totally unhinged vocal performances to record, and “Idler Wheel” has more than one. The intermittently convulsive sounds that Apple makes on “Daredevil” and “Left Alone” work, but the singing on “Regret” feels more like an act of bravado than a musical decision, and it trips you up on first listen.

The galloping instrumentation on “Left Alone” is built on the connection between Drayton’s brushed drums and Apple’s emphatic series of ascending piano duplets. Though she sings, “I don’t cry when I’m sad anymore,” the music runs against the idea that Apple is some sort of poster child for angst. There is more truth about Apple in another line, from the opening track, “Every Single Night”: “I just want to feel everything.” What that translates to, musically, is surfeit—a rapidly changing series of chords, noises, and words that pile up in something more like ecstasy than pain. “Anything We Want,” one of the songs that Apple played on tour this spring, is close to pleasure, or at least describes some enthusiastic flirting. The core rhythm, a loop that Apple re-creates live on a metal percussion instrument, began as her banging with scissors on the things that sit on her desk at home. The wordplay here echoes another kind of play, where you eventually get to do anything you want: “My scars were reflecting the mist in your headlights. I looked like a neon zebra, shaking rain off her stripes, and the rivulets had you riveted to the places that I wanted you to kiss me when we find some time alone.” We think of Apple with those knitted eyebrows and giant sullen eyes, but here is where her forehead goes smooth and she smiles. She stops fighting herself.

The album ends with “Hot Knife,” a summation of Apple’s methods: multitracking herself and her sister, the cabaret singer Maude Maggart, numerous times, until they become the least commercial barbershop quartet ever. The core of the song is a fairly dopey metaphor (“I’m a hot knife, he’s a pat of butter”), which Drayton chases with a rising and falling series of tomtom figures. (Drayton’s drum set is so beautifully tuned and recorded on “Idler” that it sounds as much like backup singing as timekeeping.) The preciousness almost sends this song into the ditch—but perhaps Apple knew this, and placed it last to be safe.

On “Every Single Night,” a toy piano plays as Apple sings about “butterflies in my brain.” Eventually the “pain comes in,” and the track shoots up for the chorus, ending on a bellowing melisma that extends the last word and makes it heave like a surfacing whale: “Every single night’s alight with my brain.” (The video contains squids and snails and makes her seem cat-lady crazy instead of cagily self-aware and goofy.) It’s not a mistake that the one word Apple repeats and distorts and plays with is “brain.” That’s where she lives, and she’s finally decided to call it home. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.